A marketing plan is useless, but planning is priceless

By David Ronald

In my experience, small businesses owners often overlook the importance of adopting a strategic approach to marketing—with dire consequences. CB Insights, a venture capital database, parsed more than 100 post-mortem essays by startup founders to pinpoint the causes they believe their businesses failed and found that poor marketing ranked eighth out of 20 (you may be surprised by the reasons that scored lower than marketing in the graph below).

(Click here to read the full article in Fortune magazine: http://for.tn/1A2Av1B.)

Good marketing helps buyers understand how you will help them be successful and why your product or service is better than what they can obtain from competitors. An effective marketing plan can help you reach your target audience, boost your customer base and grow revenues. It also helps you set clear, realistic and measurable objectives for your business.

A plan is useless, but planning is priceless, to paraphrase Winston Churchill. Developing a marketing plan is priceless because it sharpens your awareness of what makes your business unique and how to evangelize it effectively. And it will benefit your business if this planning process is repeated at least a couple of times a year—a marketing plan is not a document that you create once and store in your bottom drawer.

The plan should cover one year. For small business, this is often the best way to think about marketing. Later on you can create a section of the plan that addresses the medium-term future (ie, two to four years down the road), but the bulk of your plan should focus on the coming year.

Anticipate taking about two months to develop your marketing plan. Try to involve many people in the planning process. At a minimum, get feedback from all parts of your company—this is especially important because it will take all aspects of your company to make your marketing plan work. Don’t worry, though, because creating a great marketing plan doesn’t require a monumental effort and the process can be enjoyable.

And it will be worth it.

Thanks for reading.

SEO is becoming more intuitive and less technical

By David Ronald

The ongoing evolution of Google’s algorithms is resulting in search engine optimization becoming more intuitive and less dependent on technical proficiency.

In the early days, success at SEO absolutely mandated the involvement of specialists with deep knowledge of website functionality and the ability to write at least some HTML code. In today’s “modern” SEO environment, however, companies can rank high on a search engine list with less technical acumen.

In a controversial article for Entrepreneur magazine, Jayson Demers listed five ways to achieve SEO success:

• Create interesting content. Write high-quality material that’s relevant for your industry and adds value to your reads. Be original and informative. Don’t worry too much about keyword phrases or presenting your content in a specific way.
• Get others to acknowledge you as an authority. Make your site a magnet for inbound links which Google sees as “votes” for your site’s credibility, trust and authority. Write enough quality content and other sites will link to yours naturally over time. Build relationships with outside blogs and other publishers and they’ll help you get published.
• Become popular on social media. Establish a presence, engage with people often and syndicate great content whenever you can. Eventually, the audience will come to you naturally. Your popularity on social media also plays a role in how you rank in organic search results. For example, if you have 1,000 highly active followers on Twitter, you’ll rank higher than if you have no Twitter account at all.
• Provide a good experience. Make your website aesthetically pleasing. Make it easy for your users to find exactly what they’re looking for. Make your site fast, and optimized for any device. Make your navigation simple.
• Earn good reviews. Establish profiles on sites like Yelp and Angie’s List, then let your customers do the rest of the work for you. Make your presence on these sites known, and people will start filling out reviews on their own.

(Click here to read the full article: http://entm.ag/1e32ybo.)

Many in the SEO community feel that Demers erred by oversimplifying the challenges in obtaining page one rankings in a search engine list. Adam Stetzer addressed the key concerns in a post on Search Engine Watch.

(Click here to read the blog post: http://bit.ly/1hljVa1.)

It’s clear to me that both perspectives are valid. Google search is becoming more intuitive and, consequently, there will be circumstances where business owners can enjoy SEO success without involving specialists. At the same time, however, obtaining and retaining a page one ranking will probably require experts, especially in crowded markets places.

A relevant analogy is the increasing sophistication of computer operating systems—not so very long ago, anyone wanting to hook up a printer to a personal computer required some knowledge of DOS; nowadays, the availability of wizards enables the two devices to be connected at the push of a button. Yet, there is, and always will be, great demand for IT experts to help resolve more complex and arcane problems.

SEO appears to be on the same trajectory.

What is the most misunderstood topic in business?

By David Ronald

It’s become increasingly clear to me that, for some entrepreneurs, marketing simply equals promotion.

For some people marketing is a website; marketing is a YouTube video; marketing is a press release.

Marketing is how you are going to evangelize the awesomeness of your product and why people would be foolish not to buy it.

To some people, marketing is simply selling at internet-scale.

The reality, however, is that marketing is much, much more than this. The concept of the marketing mix (sometimes referred to as the 4Ps of marketing) was introduced by Neil Borden in the 1950s and remains an insightful way to understand the role of marketing.

Most people are familiar with the marketing mix but here it is for those who are not:

• Product—includes considerations about functionality, quality, appearance, packaging, brand, service, support and warranty
• Price— encompasses list pricing, discounts, financing, leasing options and allowances 
• Place—spans ecommerce, distribution, retail locations, geographies, channel partners and logistics 
• Promotion—includes messaging, content, social media, websites, public relations, analyst relations, and tradeshows.

As this illustrates, marketing isn’t just a few, disaggregated, outbound activities. It is, instead, a comprehensive and strategic function that should be the kernel of your business.

Marketing is important and it needs to be done right—a study by CB Insights, a venture capital database, found that ineffective marketing was the eighth (of 20) most common reason given by startup founders when explaining why their businesses had failed. (Reasons that were rated less important included an inability to attract investors, poor responsiveness to customers and employee burnout!)

So, why is marketing often implemented poorly by small business owners? Ironically, marketing isn’t difficult—and I believe the reason it’s done badly is simply because many entrepreneurs are too busy addressing topics that are deemed to be higher priority…until it’s too late.

Yes, marketing is a website; marketing is a YouTube video; marketing is a press release. But marketing is much more than these. Successful marketing requires adoption of a holistic vision of what to make, how much to sell it for, where to sell it and how to educate buyers about how it benefits them.

Until then, marketing will remain a topic that everyone thinks she/he understands but that few genuinely do.

Thanks for reading.

Starting right with good brand design

By Sharon Lee

Welcome to the very first blog post by Alphabet, a collaborative dedicated to helping small businesses build and sustain momentum. Hello, I’m Sharon and my role is to communicate your brand promise.

What does that involve? Well, it means discussing your marketing goals and determining a strategy that leads to a brand identity that is unique and strong.

Some people asked me, "Sharon, why do I need branding?" The answer is simple: you will increase your company’s success with a powerful brand. A strong brand builds awareness, evangelizes your company’s story, pulls in customers and, ultimately, increases return on investment. A strong brand gives you an edge over your competitors.

A brand is much more than a name or a logo—your brand is the sum of all the creative touch points of your company. What I mean by touch points is the visual, auditory, physical, and even psychological aspects of how your customers experience your product or service.

In this post I’ll talk about how we’re developing the Alphabet brand and will keep you updated about our progress in future posts.

Many factors influence the design of the Alphabet brand. And individual items, such as the logo, website, brochures, email templates and white papers, must serve specific functions yet tie into the branding cohesively and consistently in terms of colors, typography, imagery, tone of voice and company theme.

• First, the logo. Our challenge here was to develop a logo that had both a corporate feel and a playful element—our primary target audience is small businesses and we know you guys work hard but also like to have fun once in a while. I think we’ve achieved this by designing a formal typography as the foundation of the logo, combined with the three-color, angled ABC (which also serves as our corporate mark).
• Next, our website. We had several constraints to work around here, not least of which was the need to make our website stand out in a space crowded with competitors. That’s why we are using bold colors (our red “pops” very effectively) instead of more traditional “corporate” colors. And, because we didn’t have a ton of money to spend, we wanted to avoid stock photography, yet build an appealing website—the letters, in assorted shapes and sizes achieve that goal (while subliminally conveying the variety of personalities and skills involved in our collaborative).
• Last, but not least, our corporate brochure. We decided early on to print this brochure and, having made the decision to incur that expense, wanted to ensure people would read it. That’s why we selected an atypical gatefold construct (our target audience includes engineers and we know you guys cannot resist figuring out how stuff works :-). And it’s also the reason why we designed a bold front cover and a different, but equally attention-getting, back cover.

The most challenging, and rewarding, part of any design is coming up with an original idea that hits home with its target audience. Plus, a successful brand identity needs to be flexible and able to move through different applications over periods of time, while sustaining its voice and vigor.

Defining a brand is like a journey of business self-discovery. And our journey here at Alphabet continues…